Poverty Knowledge
Regular price
€49.99
A01=Alice O'Connor
African Americans
Anthropologist
Author_Alice O'Connor
Black Metropolis
Capitalism
Category=JBCC9
Category=JBFC
Category=NHK
Category=NHTB
Criticism
Cultural deprivation
Culture of poverty
Deviance (sociology)
Disadvantage
Economic growth
Economic inequality
Economic problem
Economic restructuring
Economics
Economist
Economy
Employment
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Exclusion
Ford Foundation
Funding
Gunnar Myrdal
Ideology
Income
Income distribution
Institution
Juvenile delinquency
Keynesian economics
Legislation
Macroeconomics
MDRC
Negative income tax
Office of Economic Opportunity
Oppression
Philanthropy
Political economy
Politician
Politics
Poverty
Poverty in the United States
Poverty reduction
Prejudice
Progressive Era
Psychology
Racism
Russell Sage Foundation
Slavery
Social class
Social disorganization theory
Social engineering (political science)
Social inequality
Social issue
Social liberalism
Social policy
Social science
Social Science Research Council
Sociology
Structural inequality
Subculture
The Affluent Society
Trade union
Underclass
Unemployment
War on Poverty
Wealth
Welfare
Welfare reform
Welfare state
Workforce
Working class
World War II
Product details
- ISBN 9780691102559
- Weight: 567g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 01 Sep 2002
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Progressive-era "poverty warriors" cast poverty in America as a problem of unemployment, low wages, labor exploitation, and political disfranchisement. In the 1990s, policy specialists made "dependency" the issue and crafted incentives to get people off welfare. Poverty Knowledge gives the first comprehensive historical account of the thinking behind these very different views of "the poverty problem," in a century-spanning inquiry into the politics, institutions, ideologies, and social science that shaped poverty research and policy. Alice O'Connor chronicles a transformation in the study of poverty, from a reform-minded inquiry into the political economy of industrial capitalism to a detached, highly technical analysis of the demographic and behavioral characteristics of the poor. Along the way, she uncovers the origins of several controversial concepts, including the "culture of poverty" and the "underclass."
She shows how such notions emerged not only from trends within the social sciences, but from the central preoccupations of twentieth-century American liberalism: economic growth, the Cold War against communism, the changing fortunes of the welfare state, and the enduring racial divide. The book details important changes in the politics and organization as well as the substance of poverty knowledge. Tracing the genesis of a still-thriving poverty research industry from its roots in the War on Poverty, it demonstrates how research agendas were subsequently influenced by an emerging obsession with welfare reform. Over the course of the twentieth century, O'Connor shows, the study of poverty became more about altering individual behavior and less about addressing structural inequality. The consequences of this steady narrowing of focus came to the fore in the 1990s, when the nation's leading poverty experts helped to end "welfare as we know it." O'Connor shows just how far they had traveled from their field's original aims.
Alice O'Connor was formerly the Assistant Director of the Project on Social Welfare and the American Future at the Ford Foundation, the Director for the Programs on Persistent Urban Poverty and International Migration at the Social Science Research Council, a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago, and a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. She is currently Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
